Rob Sheridan is a Grammy-nominated artist and creative director whose work explores thecollision of art, technology, experimentation, and visual culture. Moving between live performance, photography, video, design, and experimental media, he is known for transforming unconventional processes, technological artifacts, and creative accidents into bold, immersive visual worlds.
His recent work includes large-scale concert visuals for Pearl Jam's 2024-2025 Dark Matter World Tour and Garbage's 2026 tour, and visual design for Naughty Dog's upcoming PlayStationtitle Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. He is also completing his debut independent art book,funded by fans with more than $120,000 on Kickstarter, while developing new work inexperimental media, technology, and multidisciplinary art.Sheridan was an early pioneer of glitch art and spent 15 years as creative director for Nine Inch Nails and Trent Reznor, helping define an influential visual language across album design, digital storytelling, film, and live production.
His work from that period earned two Grammy nominationsand included the landmark Year Zero alternate reality experience. His wider body of work includes the DC/Vertigo science-fiction graphic novel High Level, fashionand design projects, and work in emerging music technology. Sheridan also presents talks and workshops exploring experimentation, creative risk, world-building, collaboration, and the possibilities that emerge when artists refuse to stay inside a single medium.
Close
Tara Buck is Senior Director of Publisher Partnerships at StackAdapt, leading publisher development and strategy across CTV and audio. A longtime AdTech leader, Tara has spent more than a decade navigating the industry from nearly every angle, with roles at The Trade Desk, Magnite, and SpotX spanning both the buy and sell sides. That breadth of experience gives her a unique perspective on where programmatic media has been, where it’s headed, and what it takes to build partnerships that move the industry forward.
Close
Megan Woodruff is a Design Technologist with a decade of experience across start-ups, consultancies, and large-scale tech companies. Dual-educated in software engineering and human centered design, she’s passionate about bridging the gap between user-driven strategy and technical execution, and is always game to learn a new technology or methodology in the process. She currently works at the New York Times, where she builds prototypes that influence product strategy across video, audio, and written media experiences. She lives and works in Seattle, where she enjoys knitting, playing volleyball, and hiking with her family and friends.
Close
Adam Constantine is the Founder and CEO of ACE Creatives, a full-service social media agency crafting digital content to maximize ROI and brand affinity. With a decade of experience, Adam has curated captivating content for creators, brands, and Fortune 500 companies, including MrBeast, Amazon, and Champion. Since founding ACE Creatives in 2017, Adam has created digital strategies, social media, and full-scale productions across the retail/e-commerce, hospitality, and automotive industries. A 3x Telly Awards recipient, with a 6’8″ frame and an ever-growing shoe collection, Adam is passionate about the art of digital storytelling and strategies for building a powerful social media presence that connects brands with audiences that matter the most.
Close
Maren Hamilton is a marketing strategist known for helping iconic brands build communities that actually care. She’s led social strategy and creator programs for brands like The North Face and Starbucks, developing campaigns that earn attention, spark conversation, and drive real business impact. Her work has been featured in outlets like AdAge and recognized across the industry for its blend of creativity, connection, and cultural relevance.
She’s spoken at events including eTail, Social Media Week and Creator Economy Live plus joined conversations on podcasts like Backcountry Marketing and Radical Content, where she shares insights on the future of social, influencer marketing, and brand storytelling. Today, she leads marketing at Popfly, a fast‑growing startup connecting brands with adventure creators.
Close
Dusty Henry is a writer, producer, and editor based in Seattle. He leads editorial at KEXP and co-creates stories about music and culture. His work has appeared in Stereogum, NPR Music, and Pigeons & Planes. He also writes the newsletter Another Thought. Dusty is also the author of ‘20th Century Ambient,’ a book that explores the history and influence of ambient music through writing, comics, and illustrations. The book is out now via Bloomsbury Books.
Close
Richa Nevatia is a marketing strategist working across growth, lifecycle marketing, brand and customer experience. She is the Founder of Strong Dori, a marketing agency that serves clients across the PNW. She works across e-commerce, customer acquisition, retention, content and brand strategy for growing consumer brands and non-profits.
Her approach to marketing combines storytelling with experimentation, segmentation and behavioral data to understand not just whether marketing performs, but why customers respond to it. She holds a Master's in Communication Leadership from the University of Washington, where her research examining consumer acceptance of generative AI in healthcare received the department's 2025 Communication Research Award. She also won the 2024 Screen Summit for the Best Strategy Project and earned an MBA from MICA in 2020.
She speaks 5 languages, has lived and worked across Eurpoe, Asia and the US, and enjoys pursuing creative hobbies. Outside of work, you can often find her reading, hiking or swimming.
Close
Cory LeBihan is a rising integrated marketing leader with more than 12 years owning client relations and growth strategies across a wealth of B2B lead gen and D2C customer acquisition accounts spanning Pharmaceutical, Real Estate, Insurance, SaaS, and Logistics services. Currently he is GM at Seattle-based independent agency, Add3, leading cross-departmental teams and building agile, durable growth systems. He also likes to go outside.
Close
Torrey Podmajersky helps teams solve business and customer problems using UX and content. She has written inclusive and accessible consumer and professional experiences for Google, OfferUp, and Microsoft. She has also written two books: Strategic Writing for UX and UX Skills for Business Strategy. Torrey takes clients, speaks, teaches, and mentors UX folks worldwide.
Close
Chris is the founder of DNW, a media agency working with small to medium size businesses. Originally from Detroit, he has spent over a decade in Seattle crafting media plans that help both drive awareness and action.
Close
Rodrigo Stockebrand is Group Director of AI Optimization at AKQA, where he helps global brands like Nike, Starbucks, Delta and others win visibility in AI-driven search. Over a 20-year career in organic search he has also led global SEO/AEO teams at Stripe, NASA, Amazon, Pfizer, and Publicis Groupe - and consulted directly with American Express, Samsung, Carnival Cruise Line, Hugo Boss, and dozens of others. His work has also helped acquire more than 10B+ new users and rank for more than 20m+ keywords. A frequent speaker and Harvard Business School guest lecturer on AI search, Rod now spends his days testing what actually moves the needle in answer engines (which can be found in his new O'Reilly book on Answer Engine Optimization).
Close
Daria Naidenov is a Senior Art Director at Microsoft who creates at the intersection of design systems and storytelling. Her work is driven by a deep interest in humanity, philosophy, and culture; and what it means to preserve all three in an age of generated abundance.
She believes that creativity is fundamentally human: born from lived experience, cultural contradiction, and the willingness to break a rule at the right moment. Her practice explores how designers can resist the pull toward sameness, build systems with taste and intention, and keep human authorship at the center of an increasingly automated creative process.
Her talk, Untrainable, makes the case that human creativity doesn't compete with AI, it outruns it. Because the future happens in lived, niche, human spaces before it ever becomes training data. And that's an advantage worth protecting.
Close
Bennett Nestok is a designer, educator, and creative strategist who believes the fastest path to a great idea sometimes starts with a terrible one. He teaches interaction design and creative technology and has worked across UX, digital products, creative direction, and visual communication. His work spans academia, nonprofit and civic projects, and creative experimentation, including projects exploring how humor, play, and unconventional thinking can make complex ideas more accessible.
A former editorial cartoonist for The Harvard Crimson and designer at the MIT Media Lab, Bennett has long been interested in the intersection of visual communication, absurdity, and human behavior. He holds a Master of Education from Harvard University and a Master of Design from the University of Cincinnati. As a teacher and practitioner, he encourages people to question assumptions, embrace experimentation, and approach creative problems with curiosity rather than fear of failure.
Close
Leslie Grandy
University of Washington Foster School of Business, Executive Education
Lead Executive in Residence
Leslie Grandy has more than 25 years of experience leading teams to innovate and deliver game-changing products at publicly traded Fortune 500 companies, including T-Mobile, Apple, Best Buy, and Amazon. She co-authored a patent for the first video subscription service in the early 2000’s long before Netflix or Hulu, and launched the first Android phone while serving as a VP at T-Mobile. Currently, she advises startups, runs corporate workshops, and serves as the Lead Executive in Residence for the Product Management Leadership Accelerator, a program she co-created with the University of Washington Foster School of Business Executive Education team. Her book, “Creative Velocity: Propelling Breakthrough Ideas in the Age of Generative AI” was published by Wiley in May 2025. Her podcast, “What If with Leslie Grandy,” is available on all major podcast platforms.
Close
Carina is a Seattle based Senior UX Designer @ Wind River, where she designs experiences for complex developer tools. A UW alum with background in human-centered design and engineering, she loves understanding people and creating experiences that improve their work and lives. When she's not designing, you can find her taking photos with her film camera, searching for a good slice of pizza, or reading a mystery novel.
Close
As a designer and creative director, Loren Judah works across mediums to create design-driven experiences rooted in storytelling and connection. His portfolio spans commercials, branded content, interactive work, title sequences, and graphics packages, with clients ranging from legacy brands to tentpole IP and AAA gaming studios. Drawing on a background in traditional filmmaking, Loren bridges cinematic storytelling and interactive experiences, often exploring how emerging technologies shape how we see and engage with the world. At WAR, he has led campaigns and experiences for clients including Epic Games, Meta, Riot Games, Nike, Coca-Cola, and the U.S. Air Force. Prior to joining WAR, Loren was an art director at Superfad, where he played a key creative role on campaigns for Sony, Nike, NFL on FOX, and Netflix.
Close
Megan Woodruff is a Design Technologist with a decade of experience across start-ups, consultancies, and large-scale tech companies. Dual-educated in software engineering and human centered design, she’s passionate about bridging the gap between user-driven strategy and technical execution, and is always game to learn a new technology or methodology in the process. She currently works at the New York Times, where she builds prototypes that influence product strategy across video, audio, and written media experiences. She lives and works in Seattle, where she enjoys knitting, playing volleyball, and hiking with her family and friends.
Close
Alfred "Fredo" Adarkwah is a growth and operations executive who works across two houses: a strategy, design, and brand marketing consultancy, and a digital marketing and product studio. Same operator, two very different rooms, and one operating discipline underneath both.
His work spans music, entertainment, pharma, sports, and lifestyle brands, with collaborators including SZA, Summer Walker, Kanye West, D'USSÉ, the NBA, Iyanu, Understood.org, the Obama Foundation, and Nike. He owns the full arc of a client relationship: the first conversation, the proposal that turns it into real work, and the maintenance that keeps it alive long after launch. His approach is relationship-first and value-first — win the work by being authentic and genuinely useful, then scale it with systems without ever losing the human on the other side.
As a first-generation Ghanaian-American, Fredo didn't take the atypical path, as he treats being present as the ultimate experience. Through this lens, he built and operates an internal AI agent workforce, named agents with mandatory human sign-off, so speed never costs any company its judgment or its trust. Originally from Massachusetts, based in Seattle.
Close
Mike Hayward is Chief Creative Officer and Partner at Copacino Fujikado, an independent creative and media agency. Mike brings a collaborative, idea-led approach to brands like REI, Ste Michelle Wine Estates, and Visit Seattle. With 20+ years of experience and a passion for mentoring, he balances emotional storytelling with strategic clarity, ensuring work connects, rather than shouts.
Close
Ellie Caldwell is Head of Strategy at Copacino Fujikado. She has experience bringing big creative ideas to life in partnership with multidisciplinary teams. Ellie is an expert in qualitative and quantitative research design, brand identity and positioning, product marketing, brand messaging, brand architecture and brand health management/improvement.
Close
Lauren Ridgley is the CEO of Left Hand Agency, a Portland-based media planning and buying agency specializing in CPG advertising built to drive measurable in-store sales. Her team runs media across the full mix for CPG brands, including paid social, CTV, programmatic, OOH, paid search, and retail media, managing the strategy behind that mix for brands navigating the shift from single-channel optimization to integrated brand and performance investment. Before founding Left Hand, Lauren was an Emmy Award-winning marketing director in TV and entertainment, a background that now shapes how she approaches brand-building within performance media. Left Hand's media buying work on behalf of CPG brands has been industry-recognized with multiple awards. She's a vocal advocate for Byron Sharp and Ehrenberg-Bass-informed marketing science, and a frequent speaker and panelist in the Pacific Northwest marketing community through NextNW. Lauren writes and publishes CPG-focused industry analysis, including her newsletter series and commentary on retail media measurement, and has spoken on panels including Indie Agency News.
Close
Michael is a third culture kid with an obsessive curiosity for all things brand, culture, and community. Having grown up in the Seattle and New York Hip Hop scene’s, he’s traveled the world competing in international breakdance competitions, managing musicians, and shooting photos and documentaries. He translated these experiences into his work early on with Red Bull as a brand manager, and later at award winning agencies such as Razorfish and Dentsu Creative, leading social strategy for the United Airlines rebrand in 2013.
After a stint on Madison Avenue, he went on to found his own creative shop, Milli, in 2014 initially focused on social strategy and content creative later evolving into a full-service creative and narrative change studio. Since then Milli has gone on to win numerous awards working with clients like Microsoft, Netflix, The Movement For Black Lives, City of Seattle, and Goodwill including producing their own, unbranded award winning films.
Michael is also currently a distinguished lecturer at the University of Washington Foster School of Business teaching brand strategy & consumer insights and serves as the vice-chair of the Seattle Film Commission.
Close
Chike Ume is a veteran strategist who's worked across multiple disciplines from comms and creative to everything in-between. In his 10+ years in the industry he’s worked with global agencies and brands like Xbox, Google, Nike and more. Chike is the Head of Strategy and partner at Milli, a creative agency focused on leaving the world a little bit better than before. He's also a former spoken word artist with a ruthless commitment to dad jokes.
Close
Brian is the Global Agentic Commerce Experience Lead at Work & Co, part of Accenture Song. He helps brands define, design, and bring to market AI-enabled commerce and product experiences that meet customers across a new kind of journey: more personal when depth matters, more efficient when speed does, and designed throughout for an agent-mediated world.
Before his current role, Brian led marketing, growth, and digital product strategy across B2B technology and experience-led organizations, with a focus on positioning and go-to-market at moments of scale, pivot, and M&A. He also teaches advanced marketing at the University of Washington Communication Leadership graduate program, where he helps students build the strategic judgement, AI fluency, and leadership mindset needed for the next era of marketing.
His perspective is practical and human: the technology may be changing quickly, but trust, clarity, and relevance still determine whether customers lean in or walk away. At this event, he'll address the new brand moment: what it takes to earn a customer relationship when they arrive already informed, AI-guided, and closer to a decision than any previous generation of buyers.
Close
Eli Kerr is a brand strategy and marketing leader with nearly two decades of experience in CPG, outdoors, and wellness. He founded Gnarly Nutrition, growing it from a dining-table startup into a leading outdoor sports nutrition brand through a successful 2023 exit. He's also the founder and proprietor of B-Side HiFi, a dedicated vinyl listening space built around community. Now a fractional CMO for founder-led, mission-driven outdoor and wellness brands, Eli splits his time between Salt Lake City and Seattle, and is an avid skier, trail runner, skateboarder, and record collector.
Close
Michael Chen is a Senior Copywriter at Zillow, where he's driven brand partnerships with Marvel Studios, HBO and MLB. His first Blizzard game was Warcraft II, which explains why he has strong opinions about where to build.
Close
Britt Fero, Founder, PB& Britt Fero runs PB&, a strategy-first creative agency built on simple ideas that make big things happen — named AdAge's Small Agency of the Year twice, and one of the 1% of women-owned agencies in the industry.
Before founding PB&, she was Chief Strategy & Media Officer at Publicis Seattle, where she drove double-digit growth, launched a media offering, and built a story incubator for startups. Earlier, she was a Partner at Cole & Weber United and spent most of her career at Fallon in Minneapolis and New York. Her clients have included United Airlines, Visit Seattle, the Seattle Kraken, the International Olympic Committee, Aflac and Oregon Humane.
Her work has been recognized by Communication Arts, the One Show, Clios, Webbys, and Cannes Lions, and she's written and spoken for Forbes, Fast Company, MediaPost, NXNW, and the DMA.
Close